A Boy and His Blob: OverClocked Remix

OverClocked Remix
I don't really have a full post, but I have been sitting on this link for a while. It's a page dedicated to compiling remixes of video game music. The archive is massive and growing all the time.  I particularly like that you can sort by system and by game.

The above video is a remix of the main theme of A Boy and His Blob.  I chose it because it's a great remix, and A Boy and his Blob is sort of our 'patron nes game' here at Two Boys and Their Blog. (get it?) 

Give it a listen, tell me what you think.  

A Picture and a Link

Check out this Mortal Kombat ad! Here's where I lifted it from:  

It8bit is a cool video game blog with a nice design aesthetic.  There's neat retro ads like the one above, and a section dedicated to indie games, including some of my favorites:  VVVVVV, Abobo's Big Adventure, and one I plan on playing soon - To the Moon. Also a preview of a new game called Riot that looks exciting and interesting.  

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Let's take a moment to reflect on the above advertisement. Apart from being kind of awesome, I want to establish some context. Mortal Kombat was a turning point in video game violence.  Prior to this, blood was something games tiptoed around, even games where the point of the game was to shoot people, or beat them into submission.  Still - not much in the way of blood.  Mortal Kombat had more blood in one punch than almost every previous game combined.  Its popularity led to the founding of the Entertainment Software Rating Board.  

But this is how they chose to advertise it?  Look at those kids, they're tiny, and still wearing gaudy 80's styles! Great scared expressions though. The tagline, while mentioning that it will hurt, also focuses on the game being 'so real.'  I guess this is a tip to the rendered photo graphics style.  But come on, the game was about blood and guts!  And generally pretty hokey looking gore, to tell you the truth, but gore nonetheless.  

I sometimes wonder how they even got the game into the arcades, and based on this advertising, I imagine they just, sort of, didn't mention the unprecedented levels of bloody violence.  Meh? 

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Thanks again to J.P.Bruneau for originally pointing me to this image. Go check out his tumblr, there's a link to an upcoming game called 'riot' that looks really.. wow!    

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oh, and here's a goofy little image mod I did for the blog:
-D

The Birth of the Name

The idea to do this blog is Dr. Potts' brain child.  He came to me with this idea sometime while I was doing the 60 Days of Gaming picture survey thing on Facebook.  I thought it was a great idea, which is why I'm still posting here.

The blog initially started out as "The Amorphous Blog," which is a play on the name of the radio show that Dr. Potts and I had on KDVS back in 2005.  That radio show was called "Cheeto! - The Amorphous Blob" since we didn't have a single genre of music that we settled on.  Later it was shortened to just "The Amorphous Blob."  At this time, the Blogspot URL was different than the title of the blog.  Now I knew that was more of a place holder until something more permanent came about.  Additionally, while I liked the title for the blog, I thought it was a little too obscure/random of sorts for the title of a video gaming blog.  One remnant from this time is the "Amorphous Archive" just over to your right, which I left because it has a nice ring to it and I see no real reason to change it.

Thus began the month long journey to come up with a name for the blog.  Little did we know that we were entering a world of annoyed frustration and face palming.  

1.  Amorphous Blog:  I tried variations on this along with the blogspot URL, and everything was taken and seemingly hadn't been updated in quite some time; as in years.

2.  The Konami Code Era:  On the morning of May 3rd (I still have the emails) I thought that "Select Start" would be a great name since it's what you do with the Konami Code when you want to select to play with two players then start to play.  I thought it would be a brilliant name.  Sadly, all variations of "Select Start" were taken and last updated sometime between 2002 and 2006.  I also thought about the long-ass "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbaselectstar.blogspot.com" as a URL, even though it's ass long.  Weeks later I would find out that that is not a valid Blogspot URL.

Then we tried other variations on "The Konami Code" for the URL.  Again, everything seemed to have been taken sometime back in 2002 or 2003.  And haven't been updated since then.  I then tried variations of "The Code" as well, and again, all the real estate had been taken.

3.  Metroid Obscuria:  Dr. Potts then had the idea of using something obscure from the Metroid series.  That also, surprisingly or not, proved fruitless.  Yes, Norfair.blogspot, Brinstar.blogspot and even SR388.blogspot were already taken.  I don't think I tried Chozo.blogspot.com, so anyone's welcome to try and take it if it isn't already.

4.  A Boy and His Blob:  In one of my first posts I typed out back on May 7th, I mentioned "A Boy and His Blob" and accidentally typed out "blog" instead.  I quickly thought, "Awesome title for a blog!!"  Yup, you guessed it, already taken (which contains only three posts from 2002).  Later that afternoon, Dr. Potts suggested what is now the title of our blog, to which I simply responded "I like it!"

And thus you have the probably somewhat longer than it needed to be story of how our little blog received his/her name.  The whole process reminds me of the whole "We've got a band, now what do we call ourselves?"

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

For The Masses

NES Games I Will Probably Never Complete

All of the games that I will be listing are from my memory.  These are games on the NES that I was never able to beat for one reason or another.  I'd like to think it was because they were crazy difficult and not because of my failure as a gamer.  Are these games passable?  Of course they are, otherwise there would've been a patch...... except not, because back in teh 1980s, 1990s and early 2000's, the final release of a console game was it's "final" release.  No patches.  No DLC.  No way to correct anything that might've gone wrong in the game testing phase.

In short, these games were pretty fucking hard.

Not that you can tell, but this is the second incantation of this list.  The first list I wrote up was made up of games that wouldn't surprise anyone that I hadn't beaten.  Games like "any" Ninja Gaiden on the NES, Blaster Master, Battletoads, Silver Surfer, Ghosts 'n Goblins, and Back to the Future.  Then I figured I would make a list of maybe not quite so well known games that were a bloody pain in the ass.  So here's that list:

Mega Man (1987)

Now that I think about it, I don't know if I've ever beaten any of the mega man games....on the NES that is. In Mega Man I, I could never get through the Guts Man stage.  Now that I think about it, I don't think I was ever able to beat Mega Man II...... or maybe any in the series.  No wait, I'm pretty sure I did beat Mega Man X.  I blame it all on constantly losing (or having my Mom/Dad) throw away those small pieces of paper that had the passwords written down on them.  That was always the problem with password games, keeping track of random pieces of paper, knowing which game they went to and where in the game they were to take you.

Back to the Future (1989)

I played this game for the first time at PAX Prime 2010 and promptly got my ass handed to me.  This game came out when I was 9, and even at the age of 30, there was no luck for me getting passed the Lou's Cafe sequence.

A Boy and His Blob: Trouble in Blobalonia  (1989)

Granted, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I was first playing this game, I didn't know what to do and what the point of the game was.  The week that I played the game, I immediately went to Blobalonia.  Yup, I didn't know that I was supposed to actually explore the real world in order to collect jellybeans.  I guess I could probably go back (if I could find the game) and actually try to beat the game.

Captain Skyhawk

I briefly went over this already in the previous post.  What the video that I previously posted didn't show you , was that you can change your altitude to help you dodge enemy fire.  The other hard part was docking with the space station, or at least it was really hard for me.  These kinds of "fit the thing into the rotating slot" things, I find that I have a hard time with.  The other nice thing with this game was that it was a one-hit-kill.  No life meter.  Well, just a life meter of one I guess.  And you have four lives.  I now know that I've gotten to the third level.  I don't think that I'd gotten to the end of the third level.

By now nearly everyone knows that games back in the early days of console gaming were required to be difficult because the memory capacity of the game cartridges was fairly limited.  Maybe I didn't have the attention span to sit and complete an entire game (I was able to get to Room 97 or 98 in Gauntlet over the course of an entire summer with my Mom so we'll rule the ADHD theory out), or maybe I didn't have ample amounts  of coordination, but whatever the reason was, these games were really difficult (to say the least) and I have no shame in my admitting this.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Sounds of Failure

Okay then, Introductions:

Four switches, I wonder what they do?

Hi, I'm David.  I've got nicknames too, like Dave.  And Doctor Potts and Potts Ivy.  And DAMP, I guess (stands for Dave-a-ma-Potts).  And everyone in my family got "Pots and Pans" at some point or another.  I'd like to requisition a drawing of me decked out in armor made entirely of pots and pans.  Anyone?

The earliest games I can remember playing were on the Atari 2600, with wood paneling.  That wood paneling was such an absurd aesthetic choice that it has stayed with me forever.  Atari gets a thumbs up for being so silly and memorable.  The 2600 also had some fun switches, one was a reset button which would bounce back into place when you moved it, and one was an on/off switch that would stay in place, I think.  Here's a picture!  (Doncha just love the internet?).  Sometimes I would get distracted by playing with the buttons when the games wouldn't work- they often had trouble working.

Check out Ian Bogost for some modern Atari programs and video game theory stuff.

I was, like Jack, active during the Nintendo/Sega console wars.  I learned to appreciate and also despise advertising campaigns during that time.  I distinctly remember Sega using a lot of aggressive and negative attitudes in their commercials, as well as made-up industry terms (blast processing anyone?).  I consoled myself by saying that they were just jealous that the SNES had much better games and was, overall, the superior console.  I was probably a bit biased- an avid reader of Nintendo Power- but hey, I was making this up on my own.  And I learned a little humility over the following years, as I watched my sad Sega friends lose their favorite hardware maker.  I will definitely want to write more about the console wars.

I've also been a big fan of RPGs.  In fact, the first non-Nintendo console I bought was a Sony Playstation, just to play Final Fantasy VII.  I agonized about this decision.  I had been following the hype leading up the FFVII, the disappointing news that it would never be released for the Nintendo 64, and, as a matter of fact, Square was breaking their Nintendo-exclusive relationship that had done a lot to make the Super Nintendo such a fantastic system.  But yes, I bought a Playstation and Final Fantasy VII (with Bushido Blade Demo) and shortly thereafter got it modded so I could play burned games.  Oh, technology, changing the way we make our consumer choices.

This is what it has come to:  Sonic on the cover of Nintendo Power

A couple of years ago, I bought a Nintendo DS, again, to mod the thing, and play emulated NES and SNES games.  That's the last name-brand gaming hardware I bought.  I have dropped out of the console world, and now play almost exclusively on the PC.  I think it was the expense that drove me away from consoles.  And also, roommates.  I always had a roommate or good friend with all the latest hardware, so I would get my fix there.  I weaned myself away from all the latest stuff, and now I find myself with no TV, but a decent enough PC.   And not nearly as much time as I had way back when.  The world of Steam, and $0-$10 Indie games is my gaming world now.  I like it.  I've played some great games:  Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip.Runner, Braid, Cave Story, Everyday Shooter and more.  Sometimes I miss the fancy AAA titles, but not most times.  Mostly I miss the time, all that time that I had to play 40 hour RPGs, all those weekends burnt.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to make breakfast.

#Console Wars, #Atari, #Introduction